Nathanael West

Nathanael West, born Nathan Weinstein (October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940), was an American author, screenwriter and satirist.

Early life

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Anna (née Wallenstein, 1878—1935) and Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878—1932), from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript.

After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. Although West did little schoolwork at Brown, he read extensively. He ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde. West's interests focused on unusual literary style as well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and mysticism, as experienced or expressed through literature and art.